Never mind GCSEs, judge students by their howlers

Another summer, another sun-dappled shot of pretty 16-year-girls hyperventilating at their GCSE results.

It's the 21st year in a row that the number of A and A* grades has gone up; that's every year since the exams were introduced. More than two-thirds of exams were marked with a C or better - another record.

You can go on arguing for ever whether it's grades or teenage brains that are being inflated, and you won't get a definitive answer. But you can get a better guide to the state of young brains from the actual things they write.

And, when it comes to stupid howlers, the Times Higher Education Supplement this week has got a lovely list, submitted by university lecturers.

One cinema student at Leeds University - oh, to do a course where DVDs are homework - referred to a film being made undercover "to draw attention to human rights abuses in the Best W**k and Gaza".

A biology student at Staffordshire University wrote a whole essay about the science of gnomes, meaning genomes.

A first-year politics student at Royal Holloway, University of London, in a paper on electoral systems, referred to one called "first parcel post".

Before we get all doom-and-gloomy about the idiotic flower of our youth, it's worth remembering that this isn't the first time students have made silly mistakes.

In 19th-century Oxford, Gladstone may have been studying algebra, hydrostatics and Herodotus but he had some pretty dim contemporaries; like the classicist who'd miscopied a friend's essay on Greek tragedy.

"Who's this Bophocles you keep referring to?" said his tutor. "Surely you mean Sophocles?"

"Well, it says Bophocles here," said the student, pointing at the essay.

A lot of the modern mistakes are, like the Bophocles incident, just slips of the pen.

They get more worrying when they are signs of a misunderstanding of the English language, as with the student who wrote to his tutor at the University of Central Lancashire: "Will you please be a referee for a job for which I am appalling?" The student wants to be a teacher; perhaps he is just highly self-aware.

There are other mistakes that show the perils of writing essays with the Google page open on your toolbar. Cutting and pasting from the internet has dangerous results.

The Times Higher Education Supplement reports on one essay about Martin Luther, which consisted of a mishmash of downloaded chunks about a 16th-century German Protestant reformer and a black American civil rights leader of the Sixties.

Mistakes such as this aren't all the internet's fault, of course; the principal fault lies in the brain of the internet user.

ut combine stupidity, a lack of teaching rigour and a research device, such as the web, that's used as one vast single reference volume, and facts and dates get mulched together into a muddled, disordered gloop; and undergraduates start thinking, like another Leeds cinema student, that political groups "used the internet to publicise their cause, just like the French Resistance did during the Second World War".

In his 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know all the big turning points in history as being able to look back at the world as an enfilade of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire the Renaissance the British Empire America and so on.

This new crop of mistakes reveals a lot of people who can't see beyond the room they're standing in, and that's pretty worrying, however good those GCSE results.

Harry Mount's Amo, Amas, Amat and All That - How to Become a Latin Lover is published by Short Books (£7.99).